Saturday, September 6, 2008

Concurrency

Written 5 September, 2008

Concurrency

When I first came to Second Life in October 2006, concurrency rates (the number of avatars online at any one time) was typically 6000-8000.I remember how excited I was when we first broke 10,000. Then—within weeks, it seemed—we broke 15k. Then 30. Then 40. Then 50.

I’m not sure of the highest-ever concurrency, but certainly the highest numbers of avatars online I’ve ever seen posted at logon less than 65,000. The asymptotic growth curve just seemed to level out after we passed 50,000. For the past year or so, the number of avatars online seems to be between 45,000 and 63,000.

That’s a bit puzzling, since the land area of SL has continued to increase dramatically. I would guess the land mass has grown by 500 to 1000 percent since the concurrency rates leveled off.

Granted, much of SL is empty, but something just doesn’t seem right.

2 comments:

Peter Stindberg said...

In my early days I did actually not pay attention to these things. All I vividly remember is that there were loads of huge malls and I seemed to be their only visitor.

What we see in land lately is that many residents - like yourself - move to their own islands, in many cases OpenSpace sims. So instead of having a 4096 parcel on mainland or an island, they get their own (or almost-own) openspace delivered. So the landmass does not grow equally like the population, but 65ksqm parcels become rather affordable private homes.

Corgi said...

I saw 72K recently, but that was during Burning Life... which I didn't dare go near, because how'm I going to explore 22 sims worth of Interesting with the kind of lag they probably had there?

Too much to see in only one week - no time for the crowds to fizzle out. Meh.

And redmapping is back, or at least here it is.